Another View: Where have all the jobs gone?

The Great Recession was devastating on many levels, from millions of jobs and homes lost to a slashing of personal worth. And we can point to the players whose bad decisions and general misconduct sent the U.S. economy over a precipice.

But was this downturn also a signal of other changes that were coming, whether or not some people engaged in wrongdoing?

The reason for this question is that the recovery from this recession is so different from previous recoveries - in one area in particular: employment.

Housing, banks and consumer spending are back, or nearly back. But the nation's unemployment is stubbornly high, officially at 7.4 percent (a healthy rate is considered to be about 5 percent). And that is the Labor Department's measurement, which some observers say is misleading because it doesn't account for those who want jobs but have stopped looking.

Some blame federal budgetary policies and regulations; others point the finger at companies sitting on a lot of cash instead of hiring to replace workers lost since the recession. Neither of these on its own - nor the factors taken together - seems to be the answer.

Perhaps it's also that the very nature of work in this country is changing.

Technology in the past 15 to 20 years has transformed entire industries as well as the personal lives of most Americans. Something as small as a cellphone has radically changed our everyday routine; why wouldn't the workplace change just as much?

There are whole new areas of enterprise spun off the technology. Even the jobs we think of as traditional "manual labor" are to some extent computerized and dependent on vast amounts of data, delivered in fractions of a second.

It's unlikely that anyone tried along the way to temper the technological revolution by tailoring it to the traditional 40-hour workweek. Employees instead rush to keep up with new systems, new paradigms.

Some employers may never return to the hiring levels of the past because it wouldn't make economic sense. Others are relying more on part-time workers. That is stressful, if not downright depressing, for traditional full-time workers to contemplate.

At the same time, the number of Americans who have chosen to break out of the traditional workweek has been rising - with a little help from the recession. Forbes recently cited studies that predict 40 percent of American workers will be free-lancers by the year 2020. How much of that is by attrition and how much is by design is hard to pinpoint, if only because so many people who have moved from employment by others to self-employment say they are happier now than before.

Certainly, everyone who needs and wants to work in this country is not going to become an entrepreneur. Many industries simply could not function without their own staff, but their number seems to be dwindling.

If we are seeing a manpower revolution to go along with the technology revolution, we are way behind in comprehending how it affects people at a personal level. It can be traumatic to change jobs or careers, whether you're a parent of small children or a worker who has held the same job for 30 years. We would like to see a broadly available resource for counseling workers and helping them tap their own creative energies for new ventures - and BEFORE they find themselves without income or a sense of direction for the future.

--The Tennessean, Nashville, Tenn.

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Another View: Where have all the jobs gone?

The Great Recession was devastating on many levels, from millions of jobs and homes lost to a slashing of personal worth. And we can point to the players whose bad decisions and general misconduct